World War I soldiers created underground art in the trenches. - 1

The scars of artillery barrages still pockmark the ruins of a fort at Chemin des Dames, where some 30,000 French troops died during ten days in April 1917. Underground, French and German forces tried to penetrate each other’s tunnels, and sometimes they fought hand to hand in pitch-black passageways.

The deadlock of trench warfare led both sides to tunnel beneath enemy positions and plant explosives. In the Oise Valley, German engineers dug this secret network of tunnels beneath the French front lines. On January 26, 1915, they detonated a charge that killed 26 French infantrymen and wounded 22.

Troops left the relative comfort of an underground quarry via a carved stairway leading up to the trenches.

U.S. troops of the 26th “Yankee” Division, billeted in an underground quarry at Chemin des Dames, carved some 500 engravings during six weeks in 1918. These include names, addresses, religious and patriotic symbols, and other images.

Some quarries could shelter thousands of men and featured amenities such as electric light. By 1918 combined tank, artillery, and air attacks made battlefields more mobile, and armies began to abandon their underground redoubts.

An observation post guards the ramparts of one of a ring of forts that protected Verdun, in northeast France. The forts’ elaborate underground shelters and tunnels were the scene of harrowing battles, including repeated attempts by German troops to drive French defenders out of tunnels with flamethrowers.

Some soldiers used their art to comment directly on the war, as in this carving of the ship 'Liberty', sinking beneath “the disasters of the 20th century.” The artist, a French soldier whose regiment was almost completely wiped out at the battle of Chemin des Dames, may have been despairing over the staggering casualties or protesting German attacks on civilian shipping.

Occasionally artists seemed to combine gallows humour with grim utility, as in the image of a mustachioed soldier impaled by a rusty nail. Soldiers hung their clothing, gear, and provisions from nails to allow them to dry. Such hooks also helped protect the items from rats, mice, and other vermin.

A rough carving of a cat may have been a wistful nod to the rodents that were rife below ground. Many soldiers ignored politics and passed their time engraving whimsical cartoons of pets and other animals. “Comic images of the everyday world provided mental relief from the overwhelming stress of the battlefield raging above,” notes photographer Jeff Gusky.

A woman is shown wearing large hair bows, a style associated with the traditional costume of Alsace, a disputed region that Germany relinquished to France after WWI. Female images are found throughout the underground, from caricatures to idealised portraits of wives and girlfriends as well as of patriotic symbols, such as Marianne, the French emblem of liberty and reason.

A relief of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, a key leader of the German war effort, peers out from a quarry wall. Portraits of famous figures cover the walls of the underground. Other passages feature images of Kaiser Wilhelm, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, as well as carvings of Buffalo Bill and Uncle Sam.

The haunted stare of a German infantryman hints at the horror of trench warfare. Germany suffered more than six million casualties during World War I, including the conscript Erich Maria Remarque, who was wounded by shrapnel. He went on to write, in 'All Quiet on the Western Front', “We had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left.”

A French cavalry officer is depicted on the wall of a quarry. At the war’s outset, cavalry forces were part of all the opposing armies and hearkened back to an age of chivalric warfare. But within weeks of the war’s outbreak in 1914, barbed wire and machine guns rendered traditional mounted attacks obsolete. Instead, horses ferried supplies, weapons, and wounded men.

Private Archie Sweetman of the 26th Yankee Division carved his self-portrait as a resolute doughboy and inscribed it with his name while billeted in a quarry at Chemin des Dames during early 1918. The Boston-born Sweetman survived the war with a minor injury.

French sappers use a ground stethoscope to listen for enemy movement in neighbouring tunnels. Silence could be alarming, an indication that explosives were likely to be detonated.

British soldiers dig a tunnel at Messines Ridge, Belgium, south of Ypres, where at least 19 massive mines were eventually exploded beneath German lines, killing thousands. So many men died along the western front that bodies are still being dug up today.

Men take respite from the front lines in a system of tunnels dug beneath Arras, France. New Zealand troops built most of the labyrinth, which was large enough to accommodate 25,000 men, in preparation for an assault in April 1917.

German soldiers pose at the entrance of a quarry in Chavigny, France, on June 6, 1915. German forces turned some of these subterranean shelters into mini-cities, installing running water, electricity, telephones, and even bakeries.

Not far from the battlefields of Chemin des Dames, children from the French village of Paissy attend class in a limestone quarry, which served as both chapel and school.

French refugees take shelter in a quarry in the Oise Valley on August 30, 1918. In the previous months the Germans had launched their last major offensive of the war, driving many civilians out of their homes and underground.

German soldiers stand at the entrance of an underground kitchen ('küche' in German, carved on an overhead beam) in an undated photo.

In 1915 a French soldier from a transportation unit sits among sculptured reliefs of Napoleon and the victorious republic, carved in living quarters of a converted quarry near Soissons.